Faculty artist Darin Atwater released “Day of Affirmation (Robert F. Kennedy),” a work with Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis, as part of album Let Freedom Swing. The original premiere was highly acclaimed by the New York Times, writing that “it wasn’t until hearing Darin Atwater’s settings of Kennedy, that the evening’s ambitions even seemed plausible.” They praised the composition, saying that “Mr. Atwater’s muscular imagination also took the idiom of the jazz orchestra, the manners of the ballad and the gestures of swing, and smartly used them to comment on the words.”